Here are the National Instant Background Check (NICS) statistics for
the first four months of Brady Pt. 2 (from startup on Nov. 30, 1998 to
Mar. 31, 1999). I obtained these from the FBI.

It seems more than 23,000 people a day buy guns for lawful use. All
of their names and addresses are carefully recorded by the federal government,
citing the Brady Law as authorization (although it, and the McClure Volkmer
Act, explicitly prohibit such recording). No records are kept on the results
of the 238 criminals turned away daily.

1,419,414 Inquiries from FFLs to the FBI Call Center
1,471,376 Inquiries from POCs, run by state police, to FBI 2,890,790 Total Calls Recorded for time period (23,695/day) 8,672,370 (Annualized estimate of total calls)

In most states, the FFLs (Federal Firearms Licensees, commonly called
dealers) call the NICS center directly to conduct background checks. These
are tracked separately from POCs (Points of Contact), where a centralized
state police bureau takes the calls from its state's FFLs, and then serves
as a go-between with the FBI. The FBI's controversial gun-tax plan, postponed
for one year (through Oct. 1999), was to only tax FFLs in states that had
no POC, at about $14 per call, to encourage those states to get their state
police to comply.

Standard operating procedure is to notify the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms of all denials (238 per day). Local law enforcement agencies
are notified on people with outstanding warrants. Results are not tracked.

At its current rate, NICS will record in the neighborhood of 10 million
American gun buyers' names in its first year, about 14% of the total citizens
estimated to bear arms. Because making such recordings is strictly prohibited
under federal law, the FBI has indicated they will begin deleting names
six months after startup (that would be 6/1/99, less than 3 weeks from
now), to prevent creating an illegal gun registry. If they do, the NICS
"registry" will only contain between four and five million of
the most recent American gun buyers at any one time.

P.S. At a recent Saturday gun show, with the NICS computer out of commission,
the only place you could legally buy a firearm -- in the whole country
-- was from a private individual, since all dealers were locked out of
business by the FBI's computer problem.